STANDOUT TRACK: No. 2, “We Used to Play Lofi Rock Music,” an eight-minute ode to love, love lost—and analog recording. The epic churns in a gritty, Sebadoh-ish fashion until, at 3:06, singer/guitarist John Nahwisky bursts into a spoken-word breakdown à la the Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston.” “The city breaks as the lights go dim, and before you know it, you’re in Washington, D.C.,” Nahwisky barks, before bemoaning the decision of many Chocolate City studios to swap their reel-to-reels for Pro Tools workstations: “The analog recording is set for the 16th, but everyone uses digital now, can’t get enough digital…too much digital…all digital, all the time.”

MUSICAL MOTIVATION: “We were trying to make an epic ballad that turned into…a song about nine different things,” says Nahwisky, 22. The Albini-esque rant was “randomly put in there [after] we wrote [the] second verse and didn’t like it.” So Ecstasy the Flower has no beef with ones and zeros? “We’re a lighthearted band,” Nahwisky says, pointing out that the song was, in fact, digitally recorded. “There’s no deep meaning,” he says.

EXURBIAN BLUES: Ecstasy the Flower hails from Frederick, Md., where Nahwisky works in the pre-iTunes economy at Record & Tape Traders. Though he appreciates the record store’s “sense of community,” Nahwisky admits that “Frederick is behind the times a little with music” and says that a move to D.C. may be in the offing. Nahwisky claims that, after checking out the band’s Nirvana-inspired vibe, Frederick concertgoers raised on a diet of metal and hardcore “stare at us like we have things growing out of our faces.